This week: What our National Grid partnership told us about younger women, a calendar of upcoming events and the latest Queenager podcast’s insights and more!
The clear skies have meant the shivery bite is back in the water at the pond – it’s getting too cold to submerge the head for long, I got brain freeze in this morning’s northerly wind. My mighty DryRobe is back on duty along with a woolly hat. It is bright after all the grey, the water green tinsel, trees bouffant against blue, warmth on my cheeks as I swim into the light, but the chilly frisson is there. Winter is coming…
Autumn brings a quickening of the pace. I’m typing this in a jersey, bare feet now be-socked. I’ve had to get my work kit on a few times this week: smart frock, make-up on my rosy cheeks (never know quite how to make foundation work on a tan, I look white, clown-like). I feel like I’m back into harness, feeling the drumbeat of the year ahead.
Kicking off a new National Grid partnership
On Monday, we went to the swanky offices of National Grid on Trafalgar Square to launch our first NOON Corporate Queenager partnership. A big moment. This is a company that really wants to hang on to senior women; indeed Cordi O’Hara, President of National Grid, explained during our kick-off Fireside Chat that 40% of their female population are aged 51-60.
She doesn’t just want to retain them. She wants her Queenagers to indulge in what she calls “Elongated thinking” about what is to come for them career wise. Her clear message was that Queenager horizons should expand during this decade. The sky should be the limit in terms of their opportunity and ambition. Cordi is a good role model – she’s one of the energy industry’s superstars.
We talked about how important purpose is to Queenagers (one of the key findings from our research). She said, “What could be more purposeful than creating the green energy network and infrastructure we need if we’re going to save the planet?” She’s right.
But there are other factors at work here too. Queenager role models – like Cordi – within organisations are crucial if we are to change the story about what women are capable of in midlife. It was so wonderful to meet a Queenager leader paying it forward for others, encouraging them to aspire, to grow, to be ambitious. (The opposite of that terrible online recruitment company Indeed which was all over the media last week with a graphic calling our 50 plus career years ‘decline’. Pah!)
I was struck by how enthused many of the younger women who attended the event were by the Queenager message. How by stressing that women’s careers can extend to retirement – 68 – and that we don’t have an expiration date or a shelf-life (despite what popular culture too often tells us) extends the runway of possibility not just for us, but for ALL women.
I was talking to a friend who is 36 who has a corporate job, a one-year-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old. She’s always been a highflier. But she confessed to me, tearfully, she was exhausted. “There just aren’t enough hours in the day to cram everything in”.
I remembered my own 30s: a big job, 2 tiny kids, long hours. I was so knackered when I look at photos from those years I realise I have no memories. It is all a blur. I gave her a hug and told her to take a breath, that there was time. That she is likely to live a 100-year life without any sell-by date simply because she’s a woman. That’s certainly what we here at NOON are campaigning to eradicate.
I wanted to tell her that although she feels the drumbeat, she does actually have time on her side. She doesn’t have to squish everything into these years. She can give herself a break and slow down, revel in the now and enjoy what she has!
Part of the point about explaining that women come into their prime at 50 is to let younger women know they have time, that they don’t have to do it all, all at once.
Companies like National Grid by making a point of heroing (or should that be heroine-ing) their Queenager workers, encouraging them to fly in their 50s, is making life so much easier and more optimistic for women in their 30s. Those “years of achievement” (the 25 to 50 slog) have the years of “becoming” to look forward to!
Our latest podcast episode: Midlife career insight
In the latest issue of the Queenager podcast, I discuss everything midlife career with the brilliant Dr Lucy Ryan, author of Revolting Women: Why midlife women leave their jobs and what we can do about it (just shortlisted for the Business Book of the year). For her PHd (which became the book) Lucy talked to hundreds of women about the Queenager Braindrain – how they had left or been forced out.
We also discuss how so many of us want to be there to care for elderly parents.
This isn’t a chore, it’s an honour (even though it’s not always easy!). I was thinking of that at my mother-in-law’s bedside last week. I rubbed moisturiser into her feet and hands and just tried to send so much love and strength into her fading frame. The love that we give the dying, at the end of life, is as important as being there at the beginning.
Why being there at the end is important
Those times have their own rhythms and demands, different from the drumbeat of the working world, but even more important. A good friend of mine died this week. An old colleague, my former deputy. He’d known me since I started out as what he always called a ‘hackette’ at 22. He was the funniest, least woke person I’ve ever known: gruff, ornery, but also kind. I saw him in hospital 3 days before he died.
Through his oxygen mask he joked about the time he was summoned in by the Managing Editor of the Telegraph and given a bollocking. “Mark,” the ME said, “it’s fine to take a taxi to the pub, but please don’t leave them outside with the metre running anymore.” Old Fleet Street, a different world of drinking and rows of black cabs outside boozers. When I heard he’d died, at only 63, I felt so sad.
When someone like that goes, a bit of how we were, how we’ve been known, a chunk of our own past, the world we were once part of dies with them. I remember my granny at 97 saying how awful it was that all her friends had died, that there was no one left who had been part of her world. She’d go every couple of months to have lunch with another 97-year-old who lived half an hour away – not because he had ever really been a good mate, but because he was the last one left. Last week I got an inkling of what she meant.
We owe death a living. We need to make the most of the time we are here and that means not accepting any limitations on what we can do – elongating our thinking, indeed! Being ambitious for the time we have here. But also revelling in the moments. If we have kids it means taking the time when they need us, whether that’s when they are small, with their pudgy little hands and sticky kisses or in their teen years with their strops and unexpected need for cuddles. It means being there for our friends or parents, including when they pass. It means taking time for each other – because that’s what really matters.
And if the drumbeat of sell-by dates, or pressure is taken away by extending the runway by championing Queenagers at work – then fantastic. We all win. Younger women and older ones too!
Would your organisation benefit from retaining more senior female talent and a better outlook for younger employees? Get in touch to find out more about our Corporate Queenager programmes – you can email me eleanor@inherspace.co.uk.
Dates to book in
A few dates for your diary where you can get stuck into some serious NOON fun and spread the joy…
You can find them all on our Events page where you can book in, snag tickets and reserve your spot!
If you’d like to join me and the NOON Crew then come to a NOON Circle (details here) or a retreat (we’ve got one room left for Wales) and five spaces left for our One Day Wasing Retreat in October.
There’s also the last AJ Bell Money Matters workshop on September 18th at 6.30pm – in which I’ll be talking to Investment Queen Baroness Helena Morrissey about what we need to know to grow our funds for the future, or put our hard-earned cash where it can do the most good.
I’ll be talking at Albright in London’s Mayfair at 6.30pm on September 24th and at the Marlborough Literary Festival at 10am on Sunday September 29th.
And roll up for our FREE Autumn Queenager Jamboree – pub Quiz, free food and booze, loads of amazing women in Drury Lane, Covent Garden on October 8th – get your tickets on Eventbrite, sponsored by AJ Bell Money Matters.
Lots of love
— Eleanor
